Updating github project members

[Colin Alworth]

When I was assigned as an owner of github.com/gwtproject, there was only one other non-Google member. The teams haven't changed since then - we have two non-Google maintainers, and three non-Google site maintainers.

I think we're long past due to update this setup - but as the most-junior addition to the "owners" group, and as a person who stands to have at least some financial gain from the GWT Project, I have avoided making any administrative change like this.

One set of changes I have been involved in - granting access to specific community members to the extracted modules that they have contributed to. This limits scope of individual contributors to the project they are working on, and requires some oversight and coordination. This work is somewhat stalled as we try to resolve an effective way to compile various locales into working applications in J2CL, but that's outside the scope of this message.

I'd like to propose updating the maintainers lists for GwtProject, after a short period of discussion here. A maintainer of a repository will have write access - ability to manage issues and pull requests, ability to push to branches (except once protected).

I've discussed this with a few contributors, and would like to propose updating the list of maintainers as follows (existing members in italics):

Project-wide - responsible for the entire github.com/gwtproject setup, including admin access to projects:
Colin Alworth (past and present contributor/reviewer, manages releases)
Thomas Broyer (past contributor, current reviewer, maintains a set of GWT archetypes and the suggested Maven plugin)
Ahmad Bawaneh (past and present contributor/reviewer, module migration, release testing)

GWT - Dev tools, JRE emulation, and existing (frozen) user modules:
Jens Nehlmeier (past contributor, current reviewer, module migration)
Zbynek Konecny (past and present contributor/reviewer, site maintainer, release testing)

GWT-site/webapp - gwtproject.org content. Presently separate repos, but now that -webapp doesn't control deployments we might consider merging them:
Jens Nehlmeier
Zbynek Konecny
Frank Hossfeld (site maintainer, release testing)

I debated about how to write this message, and ended up deciding on this format so that we could have a working starting point of past and future maintainers to consider. I do _not_ have a specific set of "criteria to meet" for any of these roles, and I would welcome any other nominations, plus also any "seconds" to advocate for these other other nominations.

This is a busy time of the year for many, so I will take no action regarding this until at least Jan 8, and will send at least one reminder if there is no other discussion before that time.

[Jens]

Seems good, I guess. Ahmad has been with the project for quite some time now, is pretty active and works for you company now, right? I think the main criteria for project-wide admin access is trust and availability so these persons can easily be contacted for whatever reasons.

Zbynek I know the least but I have seen him in reviews / PRs and some chat messages. I think you had more contact with him so I trust you.

Updating the list of maintainers also means all names not listed here will be removed from the organization / projects?

-- J. 

[Colin Alworth]

Ahmad does work for Vertispan, our company, and spends most of his paid time working on GWT and Domino. Zbynek works on the Geogbra project, and also a history of working on GWT module migration and one of the GWT plugins for Gradle. I personally have appreciated the contributions and perspectives both have brought to the project.

Looking at the last three years of activity on github, Ahmad and Zbynek are #2 and #3 contributors respectively. Dependabot is #4, and no other contributor in the last two years has made more than two contributions in that timeframe.

https://github.com/gwtproject/gwt/graphs/contributors?from=1%2F14%2F2022

Going back four years adds Goktug at #2, and Roberto at #6 - still no other contributor has more than 2 changes. The GitHub UI doesn't let you look this far back, but does permit you to edit the URL fo pick the timeframe you're interested in:

https://github.com/gwtproject/gwt/graphs/contributors?from=1%2F14%2F2022

Gathering such charts about PRs and comments is trickier, but you can at least compare these queries, which seem to give the list of PRs reviewed by the given user (though seem to also include some authored PRs as well):

https://github.com/gwtproject/gwt/issues?q=reviewed-by%3Azbynek

https://github.com/gwtproject/gwt/issues?q=reviewed-by%3Avegegoku

https://github.com/gwtproject/gwt/issues?q=commenter%3Azbynek

https://github.com/gwtproject/gwt/issues?q=commenter%3Avegegoku

Effectively, while we do receive many other issues filed/commented by others, and we do get some other reviewers, the three of us are the only code contributors at this time, and I would suggest that affiliations aside, writing good code is the metric to use for adding members as a "maintainer" - as above, this grants write access. I am not at this time suggesting additions to those with admin/owner access, which as you say requires a different level of trust and availability (and we may have other measures to consider here too).

To that end, I would also propose removing entirely inactive admins, as this list should be equally scrutinized, with expectations that members are meeting some expectations of involvement. I would expect it to be removed from these lists through inactivity than to be added through activity - but I think it is fair to say that admins are held to a higher standard than that maintainers in their involvement. Any admins not presently listed on my proposal above would be removed (almost exclusively Googlers and former Googlers).